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About TOO FAR TO GO

Stories that trace the decline and fall of a marriage, a history made up of the happiness of growing children and shared life, and the sadness of growing estrangement and the misunderstandings of love.

About TOO FAR TO GO

“The Maples stories trace the decline and fall of a marriage,” writes the author in his Foreword, a marriage that is threatened early on by the temptations of infidelity (“Snowing in Greenwich Village”) and that ends in a midlife divorce (“Here Come the Maples”). “They also illumine a history in many ways happy, of growing children and a million mundane moments shared.” That all blessings are mixed and fleeting does not make them less real, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. “A tribe segregated in a valley develops an accent, then a dialect, and then a language all its own; so does a couple. Let this collection preserve one particular dead tongue, no easier to parse than Latin.”

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Praise

“Updike sees his subject as being, in part, ‘what Freud called “normal human unhappiness,” ’ [and his] greatest delineation of it comes in the stories about Richard and Joan Maple, a young married couple who get off to a shaky start in the fifties and shakily stay together for twenty-some years. . . . This is prime Updike.”—The Boston Phoenix

“The Maples speak out loud and clear, and very much in their own voices. . . . ‘Your Lover Just Called,’ most of which is written in dialogue, is a story of classic perfection, worthy of Maupassant or Chekhov.”—Brooke Allen

“These scenes from a marriage encapsulate what many associate with classic Updike. . . . They are painstaking portraits of a bygone era . . . described in luscious, luminous prose.”—The Christian Science Monitor

About John Updike

John Updike was the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels, including The Centaur, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle… More about John Updike

About John Updike

John Updike was the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels, including The Centaur, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle… More about John Updike